The Path of Zath: Technology Roundup #1

The Google+ Long Game Is Brilliant – could Google+ eventually win out over the social network competition? They do keep adding good new features such as Hangouts and Communities and I’d rather use it more than Facebook…if only we could all agree to just move over from Facebook!

How Google Author Rank could change content marketing and journalism – as much as I’m not a fan of some of Google’s algorithm changes over the past couple of years (one hurt Zath pretty badly), I do kind of like the idea of good authors getting deserved recognition in search results, obviously it’s just another ploy to make you use Google+ and get more social signals.

Tactus first look: the screen technology that adds a physical keyboard to a tablet – this is a really interesting concept to bring to touch screens. It does seem rather futuristic and would have to work well to be really useful, but I still can help but question whether we actually need this now? Aren’t most people now getting used to typing on touch screens, although I suppose it could also be developed to be a great braille system for the blind?

Why the Facebook and Apple empires are bound to fall – it’s always tough to tell when a company might peak, be it their share price, their sales or their user-base, but like most ’empires’ I’m sure it’ll eventually happen, although in Facebook’s case, as much as I’d like us to all move on to a better alternative, there’s that annoying ‘network effect’ where it won’t happen until people leave in droves. But then that’s unlikely as long as all their friends stay, so Facebook has a pretty good lock-in until something is substantially different and better…or they make such bad decisions and screw it for themselves. Which is also probably why Apple is happy only making small upgrade changes to avoid alienating existing users.